Lingering shots at dusk, minimal dialogue and locations that look a bit like Texas. Yes, there's another Terrence Malick fan in town
Watching David Lowery's Ain't Them Bodies Saints, my mind kept harking back to something Pauline Kael wrote in her review of Weekend (1967). Back then, she said, film festivals were "littered with the corpses" of its director's imitators. Not today, of course – but it holds true if you substitute Terrence Malick for Jean-Luc Godard.
Because they're everywhere, these woozy, meandering hand-held cinematography junkies, these serial overdosers on lens-flare and the Magic Hour's crepuscular horizontal light, labouring over scripts containing under a thousand words of dialogue to breathe life into stories as wispy as half-forgotten legends.
Lowery's drama opens at sundown – though he proves more addicted to sunrise, the other, colder, bluer Magic Hour – and, yep, there's that lens flare, right in the opening seconds, as a Malicky couple (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) half-whisper their cod-poetic lines in adopted Texas drawls, within a filmic environment ruthlessly picked clean of clues to the time or place in which events unfold. An opening title reads "This was in Texas… " and I'd heard it was set in the 1970s, but the film isn't into being clear about any of it. Judging by the anonymous car models it's the 70s, but the one bar looks like something out of Deadwood and, like the rest of the movie, it's underlit to the point of annoyance.
The story, grudgingly doled out in meagre allotments, is as insubstantial as cigar smoke in the moonlight: Affleck goes to jail for shooting and injuring a cop (Foster), though Mara actually fired the gun. She meanwhile gives birth to their daughter and he breaks out of jail, making a cross-country trek back to Texas, where await old criminal enemies intent on killing him. I can discern a half-decent Don Siegel B-picture in that bald outline, but not Lowery, whose pacing skirts perilously close to catatonia, making 90-some minutes seem like 19 hours of hard slog. The feeling that lingered for me was of film-makers afraid to burst out from under the shadow of a film-maker who seems easy to imitate, but is anything but.
Malick is Malick for unique reasons: he has, or had, a ridiculously indulgent life-long, no-questions-asked deal with Paramount, and has been known to shoot a million feet of footage before painstakingly extruding his stories from the celluloid-Sargasso that results. On three occasions he has made masterpieces; on three others, not so much. Even Malick can't pull off a Malick every time.
Lynne Ramsay got him out of her system after Ratcatcher, and Andrea Arnold rather successfully integrated his nature aesthetic into her fine kitchen-sink version of Wuthering Heights. But others, Lowery included, have yet to process him out of their system. Lowery has talent, don't doubt it. I just hope, with some confidence, that his next movie will sound more like his own voice/
No comments:
Post a Comment